The Crossing
By Todd Schwartz

Donna Beegle ’90 is from a country that should not exist — a country she now battles every day. She needs your help.

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here are 37 million people in the country where Donna Beegle was born and raised. Thirteen million of those are children. There are eight million families.
The topography of her nation ranges from bucolic rural areas to teeming cities. The borders shift endlessly. The ground itself can suddenly fall away from beneath people, families, homes.
In the unusual instances when someone leaves this country for good, they often claim it never existed. There is much love and strength there, but happiness is harder to come by.
Seen on a map, her nation is shaped much like the United States, although it is made up of pockets and backwaters and segments — as though an image of the U.S. had been cut from steel and allowed to slowly rust away.
An ocean, narrow but deep, separates the land of Beegle’s birth from the country where she now lives. The citizens of her land are not on good terms with those in our America, nor have they been for some time. As far back as the 19th century, British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli described the countries as “two nations, between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy, who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts and feelings, as if they were ... inhabitants of different planets.”
Born in 1961, Beegle traveled across her homeland for 25 years before she braved the difficult and perilous crossing to our America. By the time she was 12, she had learned from her extended family the body of knowledge, passed from generation to generation, that defined survival in her nation:
Which churches and agencies give out free clothes and shoes. The dumpsters

where she could get returnable cans and bottles without being caught. How to give off an aura of violence to avoid trouble. How to fix